Friends and family gone but not forgotten

By Alonzo Weston

In the span of a month, I lost a cousin and a childhood friend.

My friend John died a month ago after a long battle with cancer. They found my cousin Curtis McGaughy dead in his apartment a week ago. It seems that when you reach a certain age you get to see classmates, co-workers, friends and relatives die regularly. You scan the obits daily to see if anyone is listed there.

Curtis was my Uncle Tommy and Aunt Ceola McGaughy’s middle son. He was the fun, mischievous one always joking and pranking as I remember. Curtis and his family moved to Denver years ago when he was young but while they lived here I got to see the family.

Curtis loved football. He was a Denver Broncos and running back Floyd Little fan. I visited the family in 1977 during Denver’s Orange Crush Super Bowl run. Curtis adopted that same bow-legged running style of Little in our sandlot game. I miss his excitement about football and almost any sport. Curtis would even get jumping up and down excited over playing those vibrating metal football games with players moving according to the metal field’s electric vibrations. The football was a piece of rolled-up cotton and the players were hard die-cast plastic figures. Pretty crude by today’s “Madden” video game measures.

The last time I saw Curtis was at my mom’s 80s birthday party a few years ago. He was the same fun-loving, joking kid I grew up with. Even though I didn’t regularly see him, I’ll miss him dearly.

John and his brother Virgil lived down the street from me on South 16th as kids. John and Virgil had vivid imaginations. They made cars out of cinder blocks in their dirt backyard. The yard was dirt because the boys wore the grass away by playing in it. By high school, John earned the nickname “The Cat” because of his slinky moves on the basketball court. He even landed on his feet soft like a cat.

When people raved about Michael Jordan flying on the basketball court, I yawned because I had seen better before with John and Virgil Williams.

Virgil was never the player John was but both of them on the basketball court could hover a long time in the air like hummingbirds. It is fantastically weird today when I remember it, but it was a commonplace occurrence as a kid when John would argue that he could float longer than Virgil but I begged to differ. Virgil could float long enough to make a cake in midair. John was an inch behind but the better player.

I visited John at his home a year before he died. He already was battling cancer then but still carried the same warm smile and courageous attitude. John had a strong faith forged by his upbringing in the St. Francis Baptist Temple. Throughout his sickness, his faith never wavered. He was a warrior until the end.

My cousin and friend will live in my memories and our conversations as we remember. God bless them both.